1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method and apparatus for use in digital image capture, and which permits a region of the captured image to be selected and copied, for example to a file, or to a computer's “clipboard”, or directly into a computer's application program.
2. Description of Related Art
There are many known apparatus and application programs for capturing a digital image of, for example, a document or photograph or scene. Such apparatus and programs will often have a display facility for displaying the captured image, a selection facility for enabling a region of the image to be controllably selected, and a copy facility for enabling the selected region to be copied to a tile, or to a temporary “clipboard”, or directly into an application program.
An example of such an application program is CamWorks 4.2 produced by Xerox Corporation. This application provides plural selection tools for enabling a user to specify how the selection of an image region is to be performed, to suit the particular image characteristics. For example, for a picture image, then a suitable selection tool is a rectangular box selection tool, where the user defines a rectangular boundary around the selected region.
The CamWorks 4.2 application also includes plural copying tools for enabling the selected region to be copied to a target location, file or application. Each time that copying is performed, the user has to specify the particular copy tool to be used, for example, “copy as text”, “copy as a color image”, or “copy as a black and white image”. This controls how the image data is processed, and the type of file generated.
Reference is made to the operations manual for CamWorks 4.2, the content of which is incorporated herein by reference, to provide technical information about the operation of the selection and copying tools.
As indicated above, many other forms of image capture apparatus and application programs are known in the art. Reference may be made, for example, to U.S. Pat. No. 5,715,501 which relates to a digital copier, and to U.S. Pat. No. 5,937,232 which relates to image processing.